Colouring Against Crisis: Imaginative Resilience and Child Agency in Ahmadreza Ahmadi's When I Coloured in the World
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54938/ijemdss.2026.05.2.687Keywords:
Resilience Theory, Imaginative Resilience, Coping Mechanism, Creative ReimaginationAbstract
Children's literature has increasingly emerged as a significant site for exploring responses to collective suffering, social instability, and cultural crises. While existing scholarships predominantly emphasize the representation of trauma and victimhood, less attention has been paid to the mechanisms through which children imaginatively negotiate and resist adverse realities. This study examines Ahmadreza Ahmadi's When I Coloured in the World through the lens of Resilience Theory, focusing on the role of creativity as a coping mechanism in the face of societal suffering, darkness, and uncertainty. The article argues that the text constructs a discourse of imaginative resilience in which the child protagonist exercises agency by symbolically transforming a damaged world through acts of coloring and creative reimagination. Rather than passively accepting bleak realities such as war, hunger, inequality, and despair, the child actively reconstructs these conditions into images of peace, abundance, hope, and harmony. Furthermore, the study situates the text within broader contemporary discussions of geopolitical uncertainty and collective anxiety, demonstrating how children's literature can function as a cultural resource for reimagining social realities and sustaining human agency amid crisis. Ultimately, the article contributes to children's literature studies, resilience studies, and contemporary trauma discourse by highlighting the transformative potential of child creativity in negotiating collective suffering and envisioning more humane futures.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Khadija Yousaf, Mehwish Javid, Saba Aslam
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